Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.

I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.